Jamaica: the mento

The first Jamaican recording studio opened in 1951 and recorded "mento"
music, a fusion of European and African folk dance music.
The island was awash in rhythm'n'blues records imported by the so called
"sound systems", eccentric traveling dance-halls run by no less eccentric
disc-jockeys such as Clement Dodd (the "Downbeat") and Duke Reid
(the "Trojan").
The poor people of the Jamaican ghettos, who could not afford to hire a band
for their parties, had to content themselves with these "sound systems".
The "selectors", the Jamaican disc-jockeys who operated those sound systems, became the real entertainers.
The selector would spin the records and would "toast" over them.
The art of "toasting", that usually consisted in rhyming vocal patterns and soon
evolved in social commentary, became as important as the music that was being
played.

In 1954 Ken Khouri started Jamaica's first record label, "Federal Records".
He inspired Reid and Dodd, who began to record local artists for their
sound system.
Towards the end of the 1950s, amateurs began to form bands
that played Caribbean music and New Orleans' rhythm'n'blues,
besides the local mento. This led to the "bluebeat" groups, which basically
were Jamaica's version of the New Orleans sound. They usually featured
saxophone, trumpet, trombone, piano, drums and bass.

Soon the bass became the dominant instrument, and the sound evolved
into the "ska". The "ska" beat had actually been invented by
Roscoe Gordon, a Memphis pianist, with No More Doggin' (1951).
Ska songs boasted an upbeat tempo, a horn section, Afro-American vocal
harmonies, jazzy riffs and staccato guitar notes.

Ska

Theophilus Beckford cut the first "ska" record, Easy Snapping, in 1959,
but Prince Buster (Cecil Campbell), owner of the
sound system "Voice of the People", was the one who, around 1961, defined
ska's somatic traits once and forever (he and his guitarist Jah Jerry).

The Wailers, featuring the young Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston,
slowed down the beat in Simmer Down (1963).
Millie Small's My Boy Lollipop (1964) was the first worldwide ska hit.
The charismatic leaders of the ska movement were
the Skatalites, a group of veteran ex-jazzmen led by saxophonist Tommy
McCook and featuring virtuoso trombonist Don Drummond and tenor saxophonist
Rolando Alphonso,
that formally existed only between 1964 and 1965
(Ball O' Fire, 1965;
Phoenix City, 1966;
the instrumental Guns Of Navarone, 1967),
but ska's star was
Desmond Dekker (Dacres), whose
Israelites (1968) launched the even faster "poppa-top",
and whose
007 Shanty Town (1967) and
Rude Boy Train
fueled the
mythology of the "rude boy".
Ska music was relatively serene and optimist, a natural soundtrack to that
age of peace and wealth, somewhat akin to the music of the
"swinging London".

Jamaica had become an independent country in 1962, but social problems
had multiplied.
During the mid Sixties, ska music evolved into "rock steady", a languid
style, named after Alton Ellis' hit Rock Steady (1966),
that emphasized sociopolitical themes, adopted electric instruments,
replaced the horns with the guitars, and promoted the bass to lead
instrument (virtually obliterating the drums).
In other words, ska mutated under the influence of
soul music. Rock steady was identified with the crowd of young delinquents
(the "rude boys")
who mimicked the British "mods" and the American "punks".
Its generational anthems were
Judge Dread (1967) by Prince Buster,
John Holt's The Tide Is High (1966) by the Paragons,
Rivers Of Babylon (1969) by the Melodians.
The music took the back seat to the vocal harmonies. This helped bring about
the supremacy of vocal groups: Wailers, Paragons, Maytals (the new name of
the Vikings of the ska hit Halleluja, 1963), Pioneers,
Melodians, Heptones, etc.

Reggae

The word "reggae" was coined around 1960 in Jamaica to identify a "ragged"
style of dance music, that still had its roots in New Orleans rhythm'n'blues.
However, reggae soon acquired the lament-like style of chanting and emphasized
the syncopated beat. It also made explicit the relationship with the
underworld of the "Rastafarians" (adepts of a millenary African faith, revived
Marcus Garvey who advocated a mass emigration back to Africa), both
in the lyrics and in the appropriation of the African nyah-bingi drumming
style (a style that mimicks the heartbeat
with its pattern of "thump-thump, pause, thump-thump").
Compared with rock music, reggae music basically inverted the role of bass and
guitar: the former was the lead, the latter beat the typical hiccupping pattern.
The paradox of reggae, of course, is that this music "unique to Jamaica" is
actually not Jamaican at all, having its foundations in the USA and Africa.

An independent label, Island, distributed Jamaican records in the UK
throughout the 1960s, but reggae became popular in the UK only when
Prince Buster's Al Capone (1967) started a brief "dance craze".
Jamaican music was very much a ghetto phenomenon, associated with gang-style
violence, but Jimmy Cliff's Wonderful World Beautiful People (1969) wed reggae with the
"peace and love" philosophy of the hippies, an association that would not die
away.
In the USA, Neil Diamond's Red Red Wine (1967) was the first reggae hit
by a pop musician.
Shortly afterwards, Johnny Nash's Hold Me Tight (1968)
propelled reggae onto the charts.
Do The Reggay (1968) by Toots (Hibbert) And The Maytals
was the record that gave the music its name.
Fredrick Toots Hibbert's vocal style was actually closer to
gospel, as proved by their other hits
(54-46, 1967; Monkey Man, 1969; Pressure Drop, 1970).

A little noticed event would have far-reaching consequences:
in 1967, the Jamaican disc-jockey Rudolph "Ruddy" Redwood had begun recording
instrumental versions of reggae hits. The success of his dance club was entirely
due to that idea.
Duke Reid, who was now the owner of the Trojan label, was the first one to
capitalize on the idea: he began releasing
singles with two sides: the original song and, on the back, the instrumental
remix. This phenomenon elevated the status of dozens of recording engineers.

Reggae music was mainly popularized by
Bob Marley (1), first as the co-leader
of the Wailers,
the band that promoted the
image of the urban guerrilla with Rude Boy (1966) and
that cut the first album of reggae music,
Best Of The Wailers (1970); and later as the
political and religious (rasta) guru of the movement, a stance that would
transform him into a star, particularly after his conversion to pop-soul
melody with ballads such as Stir It Up (1972),
I Shot The Sheriff (1973) and No Woman No Cry (1974).

Among the reggae vocal groups, the Abyssinians' Satta Massa Gana (1971)
is representative of the mood of the era.

In 1972 reggae became a staple of western radio stations thanks to
the film The Harder They Come.

Dub

More and more studio engineers were re-mixing B-sides of reggae 45 RPM singles,
dropping out the vocals and emphasizing the instrumental texture of the song.
The purpose was to allow disc-jockeys to "toast" over the record.
Engineers became more and more skilled at refining the instrumental textures,
especially when they began to employ sophisticated studio devices.
Eventually, "dub" became an art on its own.
The first dub singles appeared in 1971, but the man generally credited with
"inventing" the genre is Osbourne Ruddock, better known as
King Tubby (2),
a recording engineer who in 1970 had accidentally discovered the
appeal of stripping a song of its vocal track, and who engineered the first
dub record, Carl Patterson's Psalm Of Dub (1971).
When he got together with producer Lee "Scratch" Perry,
Blackboard Jungle (1973) was born: the first stereo "dub" album.
It was a Copernican revolution: the engineer and the producer had become
more important than the composer.
It also marked the terminal point of the "slowing down" of Jamaican music,
a process that had led from ska to reggae to rock steady. Compared with the
original, dub was like a slow-motion version.
a collaboration with melodica player Augustus Pablo
led to another seminal work,
King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown (1976).

Rainford Hugh Perry, better known as
Lee "Scratch" Perry (3), who had nursed
the Wailers, pretty much
set the reference standard for generations to come with
Double Seven (1974), the first reggae album that overdubbed synthesizers,
Revolution Dub (1975) and Super Ape (1976), one of the genre's
masterpieces.

Melodica virtuoso Augustus Pablo (2), aka Horace Swaby, penned the instrumental albums This Is Augustus Pablo (1973) and
East of the River Nile (1977), two of the most atmospheric works
of the genre.

Talk-over

"Rapping" originated from the complementary tradition of the "talk-over".
The disc-jockeys of the sound systems used to accompany the dance tracks
with impromptu melodic and spoken-word vocals, often simply to add enthusiasm
to the dance. This eventually became an art in itself.
U-Roy (Edwart Beckford) was possibly the first great
talk-over artist, the man who turned dub into a highly-effective vehicle
for agit-prop messages (Dynamic Fashion Way, 1969;
Runaway Girl, 1976;
Wake the Town, Wear You to the Ball).
Other pioneers of rapping were Dennis "Alcapone" Smith, with Forever Version (1971), Prince Jazzbo and I Roy.
Big Youth (Manley Buchanan) upped the ante with his wild sociopolitical raps
(S-90 Skank, 1972; The Killer, 1973; House Of Dread Locks,
1975; Every Nigger Is A Star, 1976), most effectively on
Dreadlocks Dread (1975).
Originally, the technique of these "toaster" consisted in
remixing other people's songs, removing the original vocals, emphasizing
the rhythmic base, and overdubbing their own rhyming stories on the resulting
track.

Jamaican revival in Britain

Reggae and ska enjoyed a major revival in Britain during the punk age.
Starting in the mid-1970s, ensembles such as Aswad, Steel Pulse, Matumbi and
UB40
offered a westernized version of Jamaican music that was rather uninspired,
but were lucky enough that the audience found affinities with the implicit
protest themes of the political punks.
At the same time, British sensations of the ska revival included Specials
and Madness.
British dub music was a more serious affair, and took longer to emerge. But, over
the long term, it was dub music, and not ska or reggae music, that stuck around, thanks
to the quality productions of Adrian Sherwood
(the brain behind African Headcharge,
Dub Syndicate and
New Age Steppers),
Jah Shaka
and prolific Guyana-born Neil Fraser, better known as Mad Professor, who
penned Beyond the Realms Of Dub (1982),
and even Aswad's own New Chapter of Dub (1982).
Artistic peaks were reached by
dub pioneer and experimentalist Keith Hudson, with Pick A Dub (1976),
and instrumental soundpainter Dennis Bovell
(a former member of Matumbi, an engineer who coined the soul-reggae fusion called "Lovers Rock"), with
Strictly Dubwise (1978), I Wah Dub (1980), probably his most
intense release, and Brain Damage (1981), a cosmopolitan work that also mixed calypso, rock and funk.
Linton Kwesi Johnson, a Jamaican poet living in England, transposed reggae's mood into dub-based sermons, arranged by Dennis Bovell, on the contemporary issues of the lumperproletariat.
Ditto for the other poet of dub, Mutabaruka. These dub poets were as musical
as their producers managed to be. Kwesi owed a lot to Bovell.

Jamaican music in the 1980s

Vocal trio Black Uhuru, supported by the rhythm section of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, wrapped reggae and Rastafarianism into a slick production of drum-machines and synthesizers, especially on Red (1981).

Third World offered a commercial fusion of reggae, funk and soul.

Innovators of the next generation included
toaster and turntablist Yellowman (Winston Foster), a pioneer of "dancehall"
(reggae music with rock drums) who established his reputation with
Mister Yellowman (1982),
crossover artists such as Eddy Grant,
with the electronic Afro-rock-reggae-funk fusion of
Walking on Sunshine (1979),
Eek-a-Mouse (Ripton Joseph Hylton), who invented a unique vocal technique that harked back to the early days of toasting,
as displayed on Wa Do Dem (1982),
and
Mikey Dread (Michael Campbell), who crafted African Anthem/ At The Control Dubwise (1979), with help from Scientist, King Tubby, Augustus Pablo and Sly & Robbie, and World War III (1981), with help from Scientist, after collaborating with the punk-rock band Clash.

As far as dub goes,
King Tubby raised an entire generation of recording engineers, who went on to
become innovators of Jamaican music, such as Prince Jammy (Lloyd James),
who concocted the all-digital reggae Under Me Sleng Teng (1985), credited
with inventing "ragga" (a fusion of reggae, rap and electronic dance music),
and Scientist (Overton Brown).

Popular reggae musicians of the 1980s included
Judy Mowatt, who, as a backup vocalist for Marley, was one of reggae's first
female performers, and, as a soloist, crossed over into pop-soul balladry,
Ivory Coast's sociopolitical bard Alpha Blondy (Kone Seydou),
and David "Ziggy" Marley, son of the prophet, who sold out his father's
myth to the international disco-pop crowds.
Dancehall toaster Shabba Ranks (Rexton Gordon)
and Shinehead (Carl Aiken)
were the stars of ragga hip-hop.

The star of the 1990s was
Buju Banton (Mark Anthony Myrie), revealed by Til Shiloh (1995).